Nov 26, 2012

Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers Speak in an Interview
about their Early Years Developing a Movement/Writing Performance Team

Part 1

...
my criteria ... [was] doing what I had not seen in the current dance work out
there. That was my mission.

—
Sally Silvers

Q: Let me begin by
directing some questions towards Sally.
I'd like to know, Sally, about the origins of your thinking about
movement. What were your early artistic
influences in dance?

SS: I danced growing
up -- you know, the little girl stuff -- ballet, tap, very small-town stuff. And I didn't think of it as anything else
except something fun to do.

Then I went to Antioch College, where I got my B.A. Cecil Taylor, the jazz pianist, was an artist
in residence there. He brought a
choreographer with him from Milwaukee, an African American man, his friend.
His work influenced me. And I had
also taken dance at Antioch. One dance
teacher, who came from Bennington College, had a sort of eclectic style incorporating
work like Merce Cunningham. But I didn't
really know much about modern dance. At
that point, I had been to the ballet, but I hadn't seen a modern dance.

So I started working with Ken Miller, the
choreographer. He was very serious. He was an artist and not a teacher. There was something different about the way
I began to think about dance, working with him.
I hadn't really thought of dance as an art form I would be interested in
until that point. I got involved in this
project with him — he was there at Antioch for about a year and a half — and I
was performing on stage. I was one of
the few people who stuck with him for the whole period of time — he was
difficult, demanding, even confrontational, I would say. But I stayed with it because I was bitten by the performance bug.

It turned out that I was good on stage, that people were
drawn to my performance. And I got a
little attention. I have some kind of
performance ability — I don't know where that came from. I'm not conscious of turning it on and off,
but there's this kind of aliveness that happens to me when I'm in public.

Then, I came to New York.
I was conflicted about that decision to move to the city — I almost took
a job working for a coal-miner paper!
But, at the last minute, I decided to come here.

At the time, I still didn't know much about postmodern
dance. I had seen Twyla Tharp and Wendy Perron. The latter had came to Antioch and danced in
sneakers. That made a big impression on
me. But I soon made some discoveries, like
the work of Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Sally Gross — many people who had roots
coming from the Judson Dance Theater tradition, which had been starting over
with what dance can be. Yvonne Rainer —
I ended up later dancing with Yvonne — was one of the founders of the
collective that formed around Judson in the early '60s. I changed tact. I started taking class from these people who
had been associated with Judson.

Still, I wasn't winning auditions. I'm a slow learner; I'm not one of those
people who can learn movement easily.
It's a gift that dancers have; and if you do it more, you do get better
at it. But you'll never be as good as
those for whom this comes easily. Those
dancers have a special eye, a brain-body connection — and that's a gift.

Q: But as you say,
there are different kinds of gifts....

SS: ... yes, but I feel I'm not gifted at that particular
thing. Which may be OK, since I became a
choreographer. I wasn't a choreographer
when I started out dancing. I was a
dancer, for sure.

A lot of things came together to make that transition
happen. One was that I met Bruce. I had gone out with poets before, but no one
with his approach to poetry, and no one with the influences he had in his
poetry, including improvised music and film — as well as work from other
experimental writers.

Q: So that was about 1978...?

BA: Well, Sally got
to town in 1976. And we got together at
the very end of 1978. She didn't do her
first piece until December of 1980.
She'd had three years here in town, not really being a dancer, taking
classes, taking workshops...

SS: ...and going to
auditions... and working a day job. I
worked for an organization that supported prisoners' rights, still combining my
politics with the dance work.

Q: I read about your
father — he was mentioned in an article on you, Sally, in the New York Times, when your recent
collaboration and concert, Yessified!,
was staged. Wasn't your father a defense
attorney who worked for Civil Rights and left-leaning causes? How did he influence you?

SS: Yes, my father
was a lawyer in a small Appalachian town, and he had very liberal ideas in a
place where almost everybody was still small-minded. He took a position that was influential on
all his children, as well as friends and acquaintances.

Q: He influenced you
when you were very young?

SS: Politically, yes
— and as my father. He came from a
coal-mining background. His attitudes
were very different than those of the parents of my friends. But I was also
rebellious. I became more radical than
he was — so maybe that was the rebellion.

Q: You took it the
next step?

SS: Yes. I wasn't going to stay the nice little
liberal. It was the heat of the
'60s. I went to Antioch, after all, the
hot-bed of radicalism.

When I met Bruce, he turned me on to more artistic
experimentation as well as sharing these politics. Things that were related to the way Bruce
wrote. I was already interested in
experimental film. And I was already
discovering experimental dance. But I
didn't know about this thing called experimental music.

Q: I'm just curious:
How did you two meet. Was it an artistic
event?

BA: Yes, we met at a
book party on the Upper West Side.

SS: I had gone with a
friend from college... and Bruce was there, with a novelist.

I hadn't tied my dance work yet to other experimental art
forms. Even though I had seen
experimental dance, I think I was still stuck on this traditional training that
I had been raised on and groomed on. I
somehow hadn't understood how experimentalism could happen in dance.

BA: And you have to
remember that, by the late 1970's, the Judson movement school from the '60's
had nearly disappeared — really, by 1975.
So those drastic influences had gotten watered down. People like Yvonne Rainer had stopped making
dances — she became, of course, a major filmmaker for 15-20 years. Other work in dance became a little more
tame.

Q: What about Movement Research. Didn't that come out of Judson?

BA: Oh, yes, that
would be one of the places where some of the work from Judson went on. And there are still places now where the
legacy goes up and down.

SS: In fact, they're
having a whole Judson platform right now, through November. So if you want to catch any of the greats,
they're coming back. Yvonne Rainer is
doing a performance. It's the 50th year
anniversary of Judson Dance Theater. But
in the late 1970's in New York, people got interested in different things.

Q: What was the
"split off" — what you have described here — between the tradition of
dance you were coming out of, and what Judson and those post-modern movements
were doing?

SS: The experimental
movement here in dance was investigating what it was possible to do, what could
possibly be called
"movement." These people
broke the mold on technique — [in modern dance] you had to go through a
particular study that was a technique in order to become a dancer. There were the great ones, the founders of
modern dance, and that was what was being taught in academia. No one was doing postmodern dance at the
time.

And so the Judson people broke the mold on dance vocabulary,
they did movement that was more pedestrian, they did collage, they worked with people who weren't dancers.

Q: By
"pedestrian," you mean every-day movement?

BA: Yes, quotidian....

Q: ... like you would
just walk across the floor on stage?...

SS: ... yes, walk, or
crawl, or run, or skip, anything that a child, for example, would do —.

BA: — and not to be clever or coy, but to open up the arena
of what movement can be. To investigate
how this would look, and how that would work, and ask: can we do this upside down, can we do this
hanging from a wall, can we do this with
sound? There was a lot of multi-media
stuff going on, Happenings, Fluxus, lots of performative work. There was an elaborate cross-genre thing
going on. So when we got to town, and
wanted to be involved in radical dance, people said, "Gee, you should have
been here 20 years ago."

Q: But don't they
always say that? And isn't there always
something "happening"?

BA: Well, as it
turned out, it was easier for Sally to be inspired by what was happening in
other disciplines. Because what was
going on in dance was much more tame by that period of time.

SS: Yes, there was a
new lyricism coming back into movement in the late '70s and early '80's.

Q: Oh... the Reagan
Era....

SS: ... yes, the Reagan Era started. And there was more autobiographical work
coming on stage for dance.

Q: Some of that might
have happened, too, a bit later, in literary studies, people doing less theory
work and beginning to do more biographical / autobiographical work by the late
'80s at least, into the early '90's.

SS: And the world of
finance of the '80's also was part of that trend — Bruce sent me this article
recently, in which the author argues that this is when money became the
product, and the casino of Wall Street was made, and not manufacturing. The divide started right about then.

Q: That was the era
of deregulation ....

SS: ... yes, deregulation...

BA: Do you remember
that Mike Davis book? The precursor to
it was real-estate — the California real-estate model, everything quick-buy....

SS: ... and people
who had been involved in the '60s felt up against a wall. And political work was now becoming work in
which you discussed your identity politics — and all the things that were wrong
in America. There was less interest in
vocabulary and movement and form. Like:
what forms were possible in dance.

BA: Or it became more
politicized, more confrontational, more crude.
The city was bankrupt. This was
the punk era, drugs-on-the-street era, and then the AIDS crisis, to top it off,
which devastated the dance world. So a
lot of people felt a need to talk about personal trauma, grief, and government
aggression, denial, people's rights.
People felt that they had to send a telegram — that maybe they can't
afford to experiment with the experiences of the viewer. They had to talk about their grandmother,
their roots....

So if you tried to do anything that had relation to the
earlier Judson school and those experiments with form, there wasn't much place
for this any longer.

SS: So I was looking
for some kind of community in dance at that period in the late '70's and into
the '80's, for which Judson was the model.
There was at that time a community in dance. It just wasn't going in the direction that
interested me.

Q: But when you're
truly an innovator — and you were mixing new things — community can be disappointing.

SS: Well, people
came along later. And there were
interesting pieces being done, as well.
But I wanted to emphasize the vocabularies that could be available to
dance and that still were not. My first
10 years I think I spent battering with vocabulary, not thinking about
themes. I was basically recording myself
in the studio, performing movement that I hadn't seen in other people's
work. That was my criteria ... doing
what I had not seen in the current dance work out there. That was my mission.

Q: I loved your recent solo piece, by the way, the one you
did in 2011, I think it was, at Dixon Place...

SS: That was in collaboration with the pianist Connie Crothers
—

BA: — and she (Sally) used her own poetry text in that
performance.

Q: Yes, it was a
stunning, powerful piece. The text was
amazing as well as your staged movement.
And let me ask a bit more about your own poetry writing — for I read
somewhere that you have long been a poet, too.

SS: Well, I have
written a little bit, but I started really, I would say, after meeting Bruce. I
didn't start writing until I learned about other ways to write, which he
introduced to me.

My early image of poetry was the same as my early image of
dance — I hadn't been radicalized yet on that front. Just understanding what Bruce's process was
helped me to make the change. I also
took a workshop from Charles Bernstein at the Poetry Project — this was
sometime around 1979 — and that influenced me.
At that point, I started doing writing, finding my own method. And sometimes I would read this work before I
would perform on stage.

CHANT DE LA SIRENE

Editor Bio

Laura Hinton is the editor and main writer of Chant de la Sirene, a weblog she started in 2009. A poet and literary-film critic, she lives in New York City, Woodstock, NY, and the South of France.

Hinton is the author ofThe Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (SUNY Press); co-editor of We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics (University of Alabama Press); editor of the recent collection Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich and the Feminist Superhero (Lexington Books); and she has published two full-length poetry books, Sisyphus My Love (To Record a Dream in a Bathtub) and Ubermutter's Death Dance, both available from BlazeVox Books.

Her multi-media poetry and poetry videos, as well as photography, are published in journals like Yew, Madhatter Review, Red Fez, Poetry Seen,and Feminist Studies. Her critical work appears in many academic and literary journals including Textual Practice, Postmodern Culture,and Women's Studies.She also has published several experimental non-fiction essays, most recently “Caretaker,” in The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.

Out of New York City, Hinton edits the chapbook series of performance poetry works for Mermaid Tenement Press, and where she teaches women's literature, visual-studies and poetics as a Professor of English at the City College of New York (CUNY). Her website is